I didn’t respond to DDG’s thread because I felt I could add nothing to the good advice she’d already received.
However, this conversation has often come up in chat and I’m somewhat stunned by how many parents to their children becoming (or even looking like becoming) sexually active.
My daughter is sexually active, and at a far younger age than I would have preferred (she’s not yet 15), but still my issues surrounding that have nothing to do with her living up to some ideal, but rather centre around her physical and emotional welfare.
I guess I see the ideal of “saving oneself” for marriage as a goal that only the individual themselves has the right to set, not one which can or should be imposed from outside. It saddens me that so many teenagers have been made to feel that they have in some way let their parents down when their parents have discovered their sexual activity.
Should we do everything practical to ensure that our children are not pressured into sexual activity before they are ready? Of course we should. Do we have the right to let our children know our personal values regarding sex? Of course we do. We also have the responsibility to ensure our children are aware of the potential physical and emotional consequences of sex and have access to whatever resources they need in order to make informed choices.
What we don’t have the right to do is demand that their values be the same as our own, and punish them when they fall short of our ideals. Our children are thinking, feeling individuals, and our job is to guide them into making the best choices for themselves, not impose the choices we would have made on them.
If you don’t believe that rejecting your children for failing to live up to arbitrary moral standards is both hurtful and damaging to them, feel free to pop into chat some time and talk to the teenagers in the channel.
Teenagers are considering and having sex at ages we baby boomers and generation Xers might think of as “too young”. And simply telling them not to isn’t going to change that reality. If we want them to abstain we need to give them some damn good reasons to do so, and it seems to me that a lot of times we fall very short of reasoned, logical answers when they ask us “why” or “why not”. We fail to come up with reasons which make sense to them.
One thing alluded to in the other thread which I found disturbing was the assumption that teenage males are predatory and detached emotionally from the sex they are having. While that may have been largely true of the teenage males of my generation, and may even be substantially true of teenage males today, an large number of the young males I talk to are very emotionally involved in their sexual relationships, and are just as vulnerable to being hurt as their female counterparts.
In summary, I don’t see virginity or the loss of it as a big deal, I see teaching our children to make informed choices and take responsibility for those choices as the objective.